


Exit Strategy

by Corvid_Knight



Series: Brothers [4]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, Bro Is An Asshole, Gen, abuse mention, as usual, my tumblr is knight-of-heart-and-art, zero dialogue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-28
Updated: 2018-02-28
Packaged: 2019-03-25 03:49:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13825860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Corvid_Knight/pseuds/Corvid_Knight
Summary: In which Dirk proves that he's very good at making plans and following through with them, and Bro isn't as good of a guardian as he seemed.





	Exit Strategy

It always gets worse when D's not home. How bad it actually is, is directly proportionate to the length of time he's gone. Maybe to the square of the latter quantity, or some exponential value; you're damn sure that it's a curve rather than a nice simple linear equation. It accelerates too fast and too hard to be a straight line. 

Your eldest brother hasn't been home for more than a week at a time in more than a year. A week is not fucking enough to get your other older brother to reset any more than the very worst of his behaviours, and as soon as D's gone Bro goes right back to making your life hell. 

There's a limit to how much time you can spend away from the apartment, and staying away too long means he gets frustrated and it's worse when you come home. There's a limit to how much time you can spend in your room, too, one imposed both by your need to eat and move and do things you can't quite do in there, and by his need to coax you out to spar with him every fucking day. 

"Spar" isn't the right word. That implies you're supposed to be practicing, learning something, honing skills. These sessions happen because he's bored, and because he can make you do almost anything he wants, and maybe because he likes hurting people. Which he does—even though you're good enough with a sword to (usually) keep your skin intact, you've seen his face when he gets pissed enough or you get sloppy enough for him to score a hit that starts you bleeding. 

He _likes_ it.

It's fucking you up. Not that he likes seeing you hurt—you can actually forgive automatic reactions—but that you don't have any choice here, any agency, any fucking power in your life. (Which isn't even true. You've got money, thanks to a semi-legal programming company you started just to see if you could, and you've got a fully-fledged false identity that's ten years older than you are in reality that you created for the same reason. Put the two together and you can, theoretically, do almost anything you want.)

( _Theoretically._ ) 

Theories aren't helping you. You're fourteen years old, you fight your older brother every day when your younger brother's at school (sometimes when Dave's home, too, but usually Bro is more distracted when you're not the only one to focus on and you can just escape back into your room), you see a therapist once a week. You find yourself on the edge of wanting to lie to her, too, because she asks you how many bad days you've had and she asks you if you've been cutting yourself or wanting to cut and there's no way to say the full truth. 

Almost all days are bad and they're getting worse. 

You don't hurt yourself, but the desire's there, too fucking strong for you to dare to look at it straight-on. It's wanting to pick up one of Bro's swords and let your hands slip across the edge. It's looking at the neatly catalogued circuitry in your room and visualizing the act of dragging the sharp sides across your arm or down your thigh. It's seeing Bro telegraph a strike in a fight, and wondering if you should block or just let him cut you. It's knowing that you can't escape the _wanting,_ not really, any more than you can escape the fucking apartment. 

You try to tell her, and maybe she gets that you're back in the bad place again, but you're very careful that she doesn't know why. 

You won't rat Bro out. 

You will not do that to him. 

He's your fucking brother, he's taken care of you and been pretty much the best brother you could want up until the last few years. Yeah, he's got a temper. Yeah, you want to get away from him. But he's never hurt you that badly, not even in a sparring match, just band-aid and first-aid-kit crap. Not much worse than the scars you have from learning to skateboard. 

Maybe a little worse. 

Maybe more than a little worse, but it's just _you._ He doesn't hurt Dave, at least. 

Once, just once in your entire life, he laid a hand on your baby brother. Backhanded him for touching one of his stupid webcams—Dave's nose bled, he started crying, and for the first and so far only time, you picked up a sword without being told to, and you goaded Bro up onto the roof. 

You ended up breaking his sword. After that, he took yours away from you and you broke his fucking nose with your forehead when he did it, took the sword back and threw it so hard it hit the air-conditioning unit and shattered into five pieces—later, you came up and retrieved them—and you _somehow_ managed to get him down on the ground, straddled him and punched him over and over until he was coughing out blood and surrender mixed together. 

His whole torso was a sunset of bruises for two weeks. You think you scared him. Not that it made him back off you—no, perish the thought. But he was noticeably less snappy with Dave for a while, and even now, months after the fact, he hasn't so much as moved to hit him. 

He doesn't hurt Dave. He _won't_ hurt Dave. Seven and a half is too young for the mock-fights that are a hell of a lot more genuine that he'll admit, Dave's too small and fragile and _Bro wouldn't hurt Dave, goddamnit._

You believe that. 

You do believe that. 

You have to be one hundred percent sure you believe that, because you're leaving. You're not staying here any fucking longer, if you stay there will be a point where you will pick up something sharp and you will _use_ it, and there's a difference between being suicidal and wanting to die, at least for you. You know you'll want to make Bro's shit stop by any means necessary, sooner or later, but if you can make it stop like this then you won't have to think about leaving your brothers for good. 

God, your therapist would have a moral crisis if she could see your thought processes right now, wouldn't she? Or maybe she'd just say that the ends justify the means. You're not sure. 

Anyway, you've been planning this for what, four months? You think that's about right. Your new apartment was easy to work out; your programming business can't pay for something as big as what you live in now, but it's just you who'll be there, not you and Dave and Bro and D and Bro's stupid porn setup. (Which fucks you up a little, when you think about it, which you don't do unless elements of it make their way into the rest of the apartment.) What you ended up with is actually a little larger than you strictly needed, but still well within what you can pay. The payment method is direct deposit, which is fucking amazing since it means you literally never had to see anyone, and probably won't in the future. 

Transportation is harder. You have the money, but you don't look quite old enough to just show up at a dealership and buy yourself a car. The fact that you're struggling as much or more with social anxiety as you ever have doesn't help, either; you don't quite trust yourself to be capable of not going into full vaporlock if you do go through with buying it yourself. You'll go off the scripts you have in your head, the ones that you write to cover contingencies and scenarios, and you will become paralyzed. You know you will. 

Which just means you have to plan around that. 

It's not all that hard to find people who're willing to do anything online, if you look hard enough, and after a couple weeks and a succession of variously-worded ads on a couple different websites, you find a guy. He's more than twice your age, and perfectly willing to buy a truck for you if you provide the money plus a couple hundred on top for his time and effort. 

He doesn't know you're fourteen, of course. You tell him that you won the lottery, your girlfriend doesn't know about it, and you're exploiting that fact to dump her. If it was true, it'd be a dick move, but he's okay with it. He even helps you load your bags into the back of your newly-acquired truck when he comes to pick you up from where you're waiting outside the apartment building. 

When you go to get your seatbelt you find that your hand's clenched in a fist, nails digging into your skin and palm somewhere between damp and straight-out wet with blood. You can't get yourself to relax enough to uncurl your fingers until the building's well in the rearview mirror. 

Bro messages you twenty-six times before the end of the day. You respond once, tell him you're not coming back, and ignore the rest. 

For the first time in your life you sleep without at least one of your brothers within earshot. It's not amazing—you miss hearing Dave mumble in his sleep, you really do—but waking up and knowing that you're not going to get harassed today sure is. 

This is better. Safer, for you. 

You can handle this.

**Author's Note:**

> if you're 14 and reading this: please don't take Dirk's example as like, good. He's an idiot. Don't meet up with people you met online unless you're 100% sure who they are.


End file.
